If you've ever wondered what the "Greatest Generation" did in the Pacific Theater during World War II, the first volume under review offers some insight into their experiences. The race war between Japan and the United States and its allies brought out the worst in most participants, and in this compendium of horror little is left to the imagination. From the Rape of Nanjing, the comfort women, biological experiments and mistreatment of POWs to the Rape of Manila, the full catalog of Japanese war crimes is surveyed here. The Allied record is also cited, including massacres of Japanese soldiers trying to surrender, the fire bombing of Tokyo, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other nightmares of war.
"Hell in the Pacific" should not be confused with the classic 1968 antiwar film (starring Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune) of the same name, about an American and a Japanese soldier marooned on a remote island in the Pacific, although both the movie and the book share a common agenda. The latter is the companion volume to a television series based on interviews with survivors of the conflict and British archival footage depicting the brutality and inhumanity that are intrinsic to war. Controversially, Allied soldiers are shown to be guilty of the very sort of cruelties and callous disregard for civilized norms that Japanese soldiers have been charged with being uniquely capable of. This book is a useful corrective to the racism implicit in the victor's narrative of the past, in which only the defeated committed atrocities.
Drawing on extensive interviews with surviving participants from Allied and Japanese forces, the book "attempts to meld eyewitness account with the conventional narrative, to record and value the lives lived and lost within the history of the Pacific War." Usefully, "Hell in the Pacific" argues that "the impression of the war as a history of Japanese savagery alone has been eroded by the growing body of evidence of Allied brutality. The issue here is less whether the two sides were as bad as each other, but whether they had more in common than was ever thought at the time . . ." After reading this account, one cannot help but agree that war makes savages of everyone.